Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “It’s a mixed blessing, son. Enjoy it while it’s there.”

  When Deuce eventually understood he was in the presence of an honest-to-God dynamite-happy Anarchist, he wondered if he should have charged more. He sought out the company rep. “Got us a definite time and place, oh and by the way—”

  “Are you out of your godforsaken mind? I don’t know you, we never spoke, get the hell away from me before somebody sees us.”

  Deuce shrugged. Worth a shot anyway.

  THE COMPANY INSPECTOR SAID, “You’ve been high-grading, Webb.”

  “Who don’t walk out of here with rocks in their dinner pail?”

  “Maybe over in Telluride, but not in this mine.”

  Webb looked at the “evidence” and said, “You know this was planted onto me. One of your finks over here. Maybe even you, Cap’n—”

  “Watch what you say.”

  “—no damned inspector yet ain’t taken a nugget when he thought he could.” Teeth bared, almost smiling.

  “Oh? seen a lot of that in your time?”

  “Everybody has. What’re we bullshittin’ about, here, really?”

  The first blow came out of the dark, filling Webb’s attention with light and pain.

  IT WAS TO BE a trail of pain, Deuce trying to draw it out, Sloat, closer to the realities of pain, trying to move it along.

  “Thought we ‘s just gonna shoot him simple and leave him where he fell.”

  “No, this one’s a special job, Sloat. Special handling. You might say we’re in the big time now.”

  “Looks like just some of the usual ten-day trash to me, Deuce.”

  “Well that’s where you’d be wrong. It turns out Brother Traverse here is a major figure in the world of criminal Anarchism.”

  “Of what’s that again?”

  “Apologies for my associate, the bigger words tend to throw him. You better get a handle on ‘Anarchism’ there, Sloat, because it’s the coming thing in our field. Piles of money to be made.”

  Webb just kept quiet. It didn’t look like these two were fixing to ask him any questions, because neither had spared him any pain that he could tell, pain and information usually being convertible, like gold and dollars, practically at a fixed rate. He didn’t know how long he’d hold out in any case if they really wanted to start in. But along with the pain, worse, he guessed, was how stupid he felt, what a hopeless damn fool, at just how deadly wrong he’d been about this kid.

  Before, Webb had only recognized it as politics, what Veikko called “procedure”—accepting that it might be necessary to lay down his life, that he was committed as if by signed contract to die for his brothers and sisters in the struggle. But now that the moment was upon him . . .

  Since teaming up, the partners had fallen into a division of labor, Sloat tending to bodies, Deuce specializing more in harming the spirit, and thrilled now that Webb was so demoralized that he couldn’t even look at them.

  Sloat had a railroad coupling pin he’d taken from the D.&R.G. once, figuring it would come in handy. It weighed a little over seven pounds, and Sloat at the moment was rolling it in a week-old copy of the Denver Post. “We done both your feet, how about let’s see your hands there, old-timer.” When he struck, he made a point of not looking his victim in the face but stayed professionally focused on what it was he was aiming to damage.

  Webb found himself crying out the names of his sons. From inside the pain, he was distantly surprised at a note of reproach in his voice, though not sure if it had been out loud or inside his thoughts. He watched the light over the ranges slowly draining away.

  After a while he couldn’t talk much. He was spitting blood. He wanted it over with. He sought Sloat’s eyes with his one undamaged one, looking for a deal. Sloat looked over at Deuce.

  “Where we headed for, li’l podner?”

  “Jeshimon.” With a malignant smile, meant to wither what spirit remained to Webb, for Jeshimon was a town whose main business was death, and the red adobe towers of Jeshimon were known and feared as the places you ended up on top of when nobody wanted you found. “You’re going over into Utah, Webb. We happen to run across some Mormon apostles in time, why you can even get baptized, get a bunch of them proxy wives what they call sealed on to you, so’s you’ll enjoy some respect among the Saints, how’s that, while you’re all waiting for that good bodily resurrection stuff.” Webb kept gazing at Sloat, blinking, waiting for some reaction, and when none came, he finally looked away.

  AS THEY WERE passing through Cortez, the notorious local gunhand Jimmy Drop happened to be out in back of the Four Corners Saloon pissing in the alley, when next thing he knew, there were Deuce and Sloat with Webb slung over a packhorse between them, on the way out of town. There was still light enough for Jimmy to recognize Deuce, who had ridden briefly with his outfit. “Hey!”

  “Shit and what next,” Sloat taking out his pistol and firing a couple of well-meaning rounds back in Jimmy’s direction.

  “No time,” Deuce agreed, using his spurs, yanking on the lead of the horse carrying Webb.

  “Can’t have none of this,” Jimmy observed to himself. He had checked his revolver at the door. Damn. Buttoning up his pants, he went running back into the saloon. “Apologies, miss, just need to borrow this a minute,” searching energetically beneath the skirts of the nearest unoccupied fandango girl.

  She was holding a buck knife and for the moment smiling. “Sir, please relocate your hand or I shall be obliged to do so myself.”

  “Hoping you might be packing a Derringer of some make—”

  “Not down there, dude rancher.” She reached into her decolletage and came up with a small over-under .22. “And it’s for rent, payable in advance.” By which time Webb and his murderers had vanished from the streets of Cortez, and shadow had taken the immeasurable plain.

  To help him through mine school, Frank had borrowed some money from his brother Reef, who in those days was known for promoting quick cash out of the air.

  “Don’t know when I can pay this back, old Reefer.”

  “Whenever that is, if I’m still alive, that would be payback enough for me, so don’t worry.” As usual, Reef wasn’t thinking that closely about what he was saying, finding it in fact impossible to imagine any kind of a future in which being dead was preferable to living. Part of the same rooster-in-the-morn attitude that kept him winning at games of chance. Or winning enough. Or he thought it did.

  One day out of the usual nowhere, Reef showed up in Golden to find Frank with his nose in a metallurgy book.

  “I have a chore to run, sort of romantic chore, nothing too difficult, you want to come along?”

  “Where to? Being’s I’ve got this exam?” Flapping the book pages at his brother for emphasis.

  “Well you look like you could use a break. Why don’t we go up Castle Rock to that amusement park and have us a few beers.”

  Why didn’t they? Frank had no idea. Next thing he knew it was daytime again, Reef had squared everything with the Professor, and they were headed for Nevada.

  After what seemed like a week on the train, “What did you need me along for, again?”

  “Cover my back.”

  “She that dangerous?”

  “Yehp, and she ain’t all that’s there.” After a couple of slow, wheeling changes of landscape, “You might like it, Francisco, why, there’s a church, a schoolhouse, any number of those back-east vegetarian restaurants—”

  “Oh I’ll find something to do.”

  “Don’t be mopin’ now.”

  “Whoa, you think I’m mopin, I ain’t mopin about this, how can you think such a thing?”

  “Don’t know, if it was me, I might be.”

  “You, Reefer, you don’t know your heart from your hatband.”

  “Put it this way—everybody has to have somebody to make em look good, which just happens to be you in this case.”

  “Course, but wait a minute, now which one . . . is making the other one look
good, again?”

  Well, it was sure another world they were riding through, a waking dream. Saltflats in the rain, no horizon, mountains and their mirage-reflections like skulls of animals from other times, washed in a white shimmer . . . sometimes you could see all the way to a planetary horizon warped into an arc. Eastbound storms were likely to carry snow with some thunder and lightning thrown in, and the valley fog was the same color as the snow.

  THE DEPOT at Nochecita had smooth stuccoed apricot walls, trimmed in a somehow luminous shade of gray—around the railhead and its freight sheds and electrical and machine shops, the town had grown, houses and businesses painted vermilion, sage, and fawn, and towering at the end of the main street, a giant sporting establishment whose turquoise and crimson electric lamps were kept lit all night and daytime, too, for the place never closed.

  There was an icehouse and a billiard parlor, a wine room, a lunch and eating counter, gambling saloons and taquerías. In the part of town across the tracks from all that, Estrella Briggs, whom everybody called Stray, was living upstairs in what had been once the domestic palace of a mine owner from the days of the first great ore strikes around here, now a dimly illicit refuge for secret lives, dark and in places unrepainted wood rearing against a sky which since this morning had been threatening storm. Walkways in from the street were covered with corrugated snow-shed roofing. The restaurant and bar on the ground-floor corner had been there since the boom times, offering two-bit all-you-can-eat specials, sawdust on the floor, heavy-duty crockery, smells of steaks, chops, venison chili, coffee and beer and so on worked into the wood of the wall paneling, old trestle tables, bar and barstools. At all hours the place’d be racketing with gambling-hall workers on their breaks, big-hearted winners and bad losers, detectives, drummers, adventuresses, pigeons, and sharpers. A sunken chamber almost like a natatorium at some hot-springs resort, so cool and dim that you forgot after a while about the desert waiting out there to resume for you soon as you stepped back into it. . . .

  STRAY, as it turned out, was real pregnant. Not only showing it, but also that other composed and dreamy thing you couldn’t help noticing right away when the rest of the neighborhood was anything but. Through the upper rooms, insomnia ruled. It happened to be a week of convergences from all over. Everybody but Stray was nearly crazy already, Reef and Frank showing up was just one more problem. There were also her friend Sage’s Mormon ex-foster parents from olden times, “sacred arrangements” going back in history to her Ma’s problems with these people, Sage’s own promise to join the faith, her latest beau, and maybe even another ex-beau, who might or might not be also about to show up, or even be in town already, along with newer influences, not so much personal it seemed as almost public, a set of born-again “friends”—though more in this official, maybe even sheriff’s-office way—“friends” more newly made than these Mormons but no less clamoring for the girl’s time, uneasy, in fact desperate to see her safe and married, who would stand literally in a circle around the couple as if enforcing the choice and allowing them no other. . . .

  Frank came quickly to understand that Stray and his brother had had a dustup, and Reef had taken off but was now repentant, and what he needed Frank along for seemed to be muscle. Maybe. Almost as if he didn’t really know what he was doing, and meant to consult Frank about it. Or as if two piss-ignorant rounders would turn out to be smarter than one.

  “Nice that you got around to tellin me anyhow.”

  “Frank, meet Stray.”

  Oh-oh, Frank thought. “Family idiot,” he introduced himself, “taggin along case anybody needs some emergency droolin done, or whatever.”

  At any given time, two or three girls were either packing or unpacking, just back from trips or just about to leave, so there were clothes new bought and not yet put on, sewing patterns and scraps of material, provisions in cans or jars or sacks, all as yet unstashed, strewn about the rooms. No claims of female tidiness around here it seemed. Though all of these girl bunkmates—how many and what their names were he never got straight either—were pleasant enough, letting Frank right into the kitchen and eventually the pantry, assigning him one of the dozen or so empty beds, he couldn’t be sure they weren’t a little wary of him for being Reef’s brother. Ready, at anybody’s first funny move, to protect Stray. There was also a possibility in the air that Stray and Sage would just fling up their hands and go vamoose town together if the beau situation got much more complicated.

  One of these semi-awaited young gents—Cooper—when he did show up, turned out to be blond, shy, scaled about seven-eighths the size you’d expect, pleasant-faced enough except for something about his upper lip, which tucked over his teeth in a protective way, as if there was deep injury of some kind in his past, long enough ago at least for this defense to have worked in and set. Wouldn’t come in the house, just sat out there astride his machine, a black and gold V-twin with white rubber tires and a brass headlamp, beaming his own blue-heaven luminaries at those who passed—with whom, despite the lip held so neutral, this tended to register as a smile.

  Cooper and his rig were parked across the street. Frank, trying to be helpful, went down there to look them both over. “How you doin?”

  The scaled-down motor badman nodded back, beaming away.

  “Lookin for Sage?” coming out harsher than it should. Maybe this got Cooper to dim down a little, though given the eyeball diameter here, it wasn’t much as flinches go. “‘Cause I think she went to the depot, ‘s all I meant.”

  “Meetin somebody, or leavin town?”

  “Didt’n hear no more’n ‘at.”

  “Will anybody mind some pickin?” Now producing a “Cornell” model Acme guitar, Grand Concert size, mail-ordered from Sears and Roebuck, whose notes, as he began to play, rang like schoolbells from end to dusty end of the desert town. Lunchtime customers came squinting out of the gloom of the Double Jack or detouring down the alley to see what this might be. As he sang, the newcomer had his way-too-readable eyes locked on the upstairs windows across the street, waiting for faces there, or a particular face, to be drawn by the music, which now and then found strange notes added into the guitar chords, as though Cooper had hit between the wrong frets, only somehow it sounded right. Little kids from the schoolhouse next door came piling out into shade under cottonwood trees or onto porch steps to eat or play with their lunch, some of the moodier even to sing along—

  Out on the wind . . .

  Durango dove,

  Ride the sky,

  Dare the storm. . . .

  We never once

  Did speak of love,

  Or I’d be free,

  And a long time gone. . . .

  When the lamplight

  Comes on in town,

  Rings and rouge,

  Satin gown . . .

  Oh, but my

  Lost . . .

  Durango dove,

  Do they believe it all,

  The way I do?

  Would they fall

  Into your sky,

  Even die,

  Dove, for you. . . .

  The small, vibratoless voices, wind in cottonwoods. Cooper’s fingers squeaking along the wire-wrapped strings, creaky percussion of wagon traffic in the dirt streets. The onset of siesta time. The pearl and windless sky. And who meanwhile had materialized at the upstairs window? The boy’s ironclad lip slid up into the most unexpected of smiles, not very controlled, way too longing. Sage appeared on the outside stairs in some saloon-dancer’s practice concern of palest gray, all legs and sobriety, coming down to him so smoothly, without a thought for step-by-step details of her entrance, all as easy and light as a breath, that before the young motor-wheelman could so much as blink, she had slipped a bare forearm into his shirtsleeve up alongside of his own arm, and he was trying to focus ‘em baby blues, was how close she was standing, though she still hadn’t quite looked him in the face.

  Reef couldn’t believe it. “Three weeks’ wages for one those things? Might b
e worth it. Couldn’t be that hard to learn how to play.”

  “You think it’d help you?” inquired Frank, innocently.

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, the schoolteacher next door was out on the second-floor veranda preparing meals for the next day. Frank couldn’t sleep. He stumbled out onto the hardpan and happened to look up. “You still working?”

  “You still loitering down there?”

  “I could loiter up there, I guess.”

  “Have to put you to work.”

  “Sure.”

  Up close, in the light from the streetlamps, he couldn’t help noticing how pretty she was—her cheeks, beneath dark eyes and eyebrows, showing just the beginnings of some weathering in, desert influence, no doubt. . . .

  “Here, do these peas. Have you known Estrella for long?”

  “Well . . . it’s her and my brother—”

  “Oh Lord. That was ‘at Reef Traverse?”

  “Was last time I looked—I’m Frank . . . the one that ain’t Reef?”

  “Linnet Dawes.” A desert lady’s hand, a square handshake that didn’t choose to linger. Or, he guessed, loiter.

  “Reef’s well known around town here, is he?”

  “Estrella has mentioned him once or twice. Not that we’re confidantes or anything.”

  A midnight breeze had risen, bringing with it the sound of a creek not far away. As if Linnet’s own serenity might be catching, he felt content to just sit there and shell peas, without much need to be chinning away, though he did slide his eyeballs over now and then to see what she might be up to in the fractional moonlight, and even found her looking at him once or twice in the same sidelong way.

  Was it just this country? Something to do with the relative humidity, maybe? Frank had been noticing some kind of deadman switch or shutdown mechanism at work which, every time an interesting or even interested woman appeared, immediately doomed all possibility of romance. Men in this era not being known to sigh, he exhaled expressively. A fellow could rely on Market Street only so far, and then even that began to get discouraging, plagal cadences on parlor pianos, bright lights, and mirrors to the contrary notwithstanding.